This invention relates generally to online advertising, and in particular to preventing collection of sensitive information by advertisers though targeting criteria.
Online advertising has become a profitable business, allowing commercial and private entities to place advertisements on websites and within native applications for presentation to viewing users accessing these websites or applications. Advertisers may anonymously collect and analyze data associated with their viewing users to provide additional advertisements that are more relevant to the viewing users' interests. This may allow advertisers to obtain sensitive information about viewing users.
For example, a problem may arise if an advertiser attempts to target an advertisement to users based on particularly sensitive information, such as political affiliation or sexual orientation. By putting a tracking pixel in the advertisement capable of recording the user's exposure to the advertisement in a cookie, advertisers can track whether the advertisement has been served to the user. This allows advertisers to associate the sensitive information with those users, which may be particularly undesirable where advertisers have personally identifiable information for the users.